For a long time, drugs have been played a role in the social life of the art world. Charles Baudelaire wrote about them. If you do not possess a Delacroix, he said, the next best thing is to be high. But he was opposed to drug use, a weak person’s way of achieving aesthetic experience. In the 1960s, when use of marijuana and LSD became commonplace amongst the American middle-classes, drugs certainly influenced how visual art was made and seen. Many believed that getting high was the best way to see through the political subterfuges of the establishment. And yet social historians of art hesitate to introduce this history—in which many of them must, I expect, have participated—into their narratives. Thomas Crow’s great The Rise of the Sixties: American and European Art in the Era of Dissent, for instance, focuses instead on the civil rights movement, the consumer economy, and the Vietnam War. The same is true of the grand history of modernism by the writers associated with Rosalind Krauss’s October.

Are You Experienced? is a dazzling, extraordinarily radical revisionist history. For since taking drugs changes perception, they surely must affect how art is made and seen. Everyone sees that 1960s head shop art shows the direct influence of psychedelics, but what is the connection, exactly, between the promiscuous use of drugs and art world art? Ken Johnson, who came of age in this period, offers a highly personal account of it. His book is very good at explaining how drugs were linked to seductive ideals of political liberation; to contemporary films; and to a great variety of art from the past half-century. He describes how R. Crumb was inspired by his acid trips; how James Rosenquist’s F-111 deals with the endless flow of information, which especially fascinated people who were high; and he connects the writing of Robert Smithson, and the art of Chris Burden and Richard Tuttle, with the experience of being stoned. His aim, Johnson explains, is not to link individual artists or works of art with drugs, but to point to the ways that the drug culture influenced how a great deal of art was made and seen, whatever the personal concerns of the artists. In the 1960s “some kind of awakening took place in art. . . and the creative and intellectual energies that were brought to life are still feeding the imaginations of artists today” (p. 220-1).

Johnson himself certainly is not nostalgic, and has a critical perspective on the era of his youth. Being high, he rightly notes, didn’t make you a better person, or saner. Nor did it make you an original artist. But you cannot understand much recent art without knowing this history. “The psychedelic culture of the ‘6os involved most of the same aspirations that contemporary art has, and it became for me a hub where all roads intersected” (p. 225). Part of the fascination of Johnson’s account lies in its very fast movement and the variety of paintings and sculptures discussed. “If todays art is about altering consciousness and doing so broadly,” he writes, ‘what better medium to achieve that than computers and the Internet, which can reach millions?” (p. 101). When he pulls such different artists into the analysis as Ed Ruscha, Sigmar Polke, David Salle, Cindy Sherman, Sherrie Levine and Lucas Samaras then we see how diverse the drug-fuelled experiences of art have been. Jeff Koons’ erotic scenes, Tino Sehgal’s performances and Damien Hirst’s The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living all pose the question: “In a real, shark-infested world, can art be a means to attain broad-minded, transcendental consciousness?” (p. 199). I cannot think of a better one-sentence statement describing the present state of our art world.

After you read this book, lots of familiar art will look different—as if you, too, have momentarily become high. Strange enough to be a masterpiece, its quick movement and far reaching analysis is a reminder of how slow moving, by comparison, is almost all scholarly writing about modernism and contemporary art. We are accustomed to make a distinction between art history, which is frankly academic and art criticism, which provides a lively perspective on the immediate present. Are You Experienced? gives reason to question that distinction. Unless an artist can sketch a man throwing himself from the fourth floor before he hits the ground, Baudelaire quotes Delacroix to say, he “will never be capable of producing great machines.” Of course, Baudelaire also describes himself, for a gifted art critic, too, must be capable of responding very quickly. Always suggestive, always readable and very often highly original, Johnson is as supple as anyone writing art history today.

If you are interested in viewing the psychedelic art I made during the course of more than 5,000 LSD trips over the past 40 years, please visit http://www.flickr.com/photos/jdyf333/ (The caption of the first item in my photostream has a link to a selection of my art and a link to my intense psychedelic autobiography, etc.)

http://currentartpics.blogspot.com CAP

Polke was certainly into drugs in a big way for most of the 70s. He virtually gave up art and went travelling through the middle east. He eventually ‘got it back together’ as they used to say. But my impression is that most of his intuitions were already in place before the drug phase and returning from it only confirmed or strengthened his convictions about ‘higher powers’ – spiritual collusion (magick) and faith in process (chemical, printing or political).

I don’t see Rosenquist’s juxtapositions as especially drug-inspired. These derive from advertising layouts and Surrealism and Dada (which in some cases has drug inspiration – but long before the whacked-out 60s).